Using Drupal Gardens to Enhance your Drupal Website

Drupal is an open source software application designed for content management. Using Drupal, you can create wonderful websites and manage, publish and organize your website content the best way possible. Drupal Gardens is a Drupal Service that is offered to take the creation of websites to a step higher by integrating the flexibility and the power of Drupal platform. Drupal Gardens makes it easier to handle websites as you do not require any basic requirements of programming knowledge or server maintenance support.

Features of Drupal Gardens

Drupal Gardens features various options to manage the website easily and to reach your end users on a wider scale. Some of the features of Drupal Gardens are listed below:

Built on a wonderful CMS: Drupal Gardens is constructed and developed on the most powerful Content Management System in the market called Drupal. It has a feature line of Drupal 7 present in it.

Social Integration: Drupal Gardens is built with an ability to integrate well with the various social networking sites and communities such as Facebook and Twitter. With the help of these social connections, you can be connected to your users even on a personal line.

Mobile Friendly: Drupal Gardens supports the mobile connection feature, which allows you to post your website content from your iPhone. You can access your website easily from anywhere through this feature.

Better Display through Views: Drupal Gardens allow you to manage media, content, users and other aspects by creating mashups or custom displays with the help of Drupal Views.

Managing Galleries: Drupal Gardens assists you in managing all the different galleries such as the image galleries, videos galleries that include Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo etc., and so on by easily making available a provision to resize the thumbnails and customizing them.

Simple Start: Drupal Gardens allows you to launch websites simply without even worrying about the technicalities of software administration, bandwidth and complexities of Server management as all these aspects are by default taken care.

Survey Analysis: Drupal Gardens allows you to perform a detailed analysis on the surveys that you conduct with your website visitors after downloading the same.

Friendly Design: Drupal Gardens provides a simple and friendly point-and-click design that will make it an easy job even for the non-technical folks to create websites.

OpenSaaS Technology: Drupal Gardens allows you to export everything including the files, database and code at any point of time with the provision of this OpenSaaS technology to avoid lock-ins.

Numerous Themes: Drupal Gardens renders a gallery of templates and themes that help you to start with your website development at a quicker pace. You can even use the ThemeBuilder option to build your own template or theme design.

Drupal Gardens with reference to Drupal

In this section of the article, we will try to bring about the difference between Drupal and Drupal Gardens by analyzing the additional features that are being offered by Drupal Gardens with respect to Drupal CMS.

Extra Modules: You need not search the modules and download them like in Drupal 7. Rather Drupal Gardens comes along with a pre-defined set of modules, reducing the time for manual search and download process. All you have to remember is, you cannot upgrade the existing modules or install additional modules as it is designed to provide a standardized experience to all the users.

ThemeBuilder Feature: You can design your own customized theme for your Drupal website using the ThemeBuilder feature available under the Appearance menu. While working with this feature you can instantly see the updated look and feel of your website so that you can make changes if necessary.

SaaS Availability: You can decide on exporting the entire website to a different hosting service without any lock-in with Drupal Gardens – the vendor. SaaS stand for Software-as-a-service and it is an open service.

Support Services: You can avail the support and maintenance services provided by the Acquia Support and Maintenance Team. You can get guidance on how-to-perform certain tasks and customization of CSS.

Managing multiple sites at once: You can manage your various Drupal sites with the help of a single login into your Drupal Gardens account. By doing so, you can avoid opening multiple sites and logging into them unnecessarily.

Monitoring and Hosting Issues: You can stop worrying about the various hosting and maintenance issues such as site speed, disk space, site traffic, backups and uptimes; as all these will be taken care of the infrastructure provided by the Acquia Cloud Enterprise.

Briefly

Drupal Gardens takes you to a step further than Drupal 7 with all its additional features, support and maintenance services.